Manuscript Detailing Sir Isaac Newton's Apple Incident Now Available Online

The Royal Society in London is making available in digital form the key original manuscript that describes how Sir Isaac Newton devised his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple falling from a tree in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire.

While Newton left no written account of the falling apple, one particular account written by one of Newton's younger contemporaries, an antiquarian and proto-archaeologist called William Stukeley, chronicles an episode between the two in 1726.

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden & drank thea under the shade of some apple tree; only he & myself," Stukeley wrote in the meticulously handwritten manuscript released by the Royal Society.

"Amid other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why sh[oul]d that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood.

"Why sh[oul]d it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth's centre? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth's centre, not in any side of the Earth.

"Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple."

Historians say this is the most detailed account of the apple ancedote.